Recently Google stopped displaying my business phone number in the Local One Box summery however if you click on details it shows my phone number. Is there a checklist I should go through to figure out what happened? Yellow Pages has a different phone number for my company so they can track which customers called from their ad. Is it possible that the… more Â»

I get that Google wants to automatcially select a category it thinks best suits a business, so why do they ask us for categories? I created an entry for our daycare center and used “daycare, preschool, private school”. All of these make perfect sense. Google put us in “Colleges and universities”. I know why. We are called:… more Â»

Hello, I uploaded a bulk feed list file on Jan. 31st 2008 and it doesn’t appear to be working. On my administration page for business location lists all statuses as following: Awaiting next update. Changes take up to 4 weeks to appear on Google Maps As i understand it, this status should report Active if they are live…. more Â»

I have a business listing and the name is incorrect. I made a request to edit the business listing Feb 12 and it is still not corrected. The link is costing me many concerns with my career and business as linking to a dead prior agent can be viewed as improper on my part. I NEED to remove the name Sam Carrello from my address. THIS is an… more Â»

Does bulk upload work? There seems to be many messages about it does work, doesn’t work, has stopped working, takes a long time, etc. Is there any definitive statement on whether this function is currently working (as of 2/29/08)? and How long is it taking for bulk upload submissions to show up?… more Â»

I have posted both of my business under services attorney’s and servies legal aid. My business does not show when you do a earch for an attorney in my city. When you do a search of the business name one of them comes up under colleges and universities and the other comes up under dentist and orthodontics…. more Â»

Please can someone help as this is keeping me awake at night. We have a guest house in Oban Scotland. ( The Old Manse in Oban). Since the introduction of the local directory with Google Maps – which now comes up first in any search – we have seen our bookings go down the pan. We used to come up… more Â»

Hello, I’ve got multiple locations for the same business that I’m trying to list on Google maps. I can only verify my listing via the postcard mailer because the phone goes directly to VM. Some of my locations have received the mailer and others have not. I’ve tried to re-send it a couple of times to locations that did not get the mailer, but with… more Â»

Hi I have been trying for ages to try and get our business listed under a category that actually fits what my company does. I have noticed that there is a company in North Vancouver that shows the Category they are listed in as Leather. I cannot find this Category anywhere. I wholesale leather to interior designers, so when… more Â»

8 thoughts on “Google Maps: The cacophony of complaints continue, links to the dead?”

I know that this is very frustrating for many people. You would think that something like Google Maps results which takes up the top real estate on many searches would have a larger team devoted to making this feature more accurate and faster to update etc.

It isn’t clear to me what Google’s priorities are. What I see and what the typical searcher sees may not be the same thing and these problems while real to the small business people may or may not represent a significant % of the problems the searchers face when interacting with Google

That being said, these small business people should be viewed by Google as a powerful early warning system. If the business owner has heard about the problem from a customer and has taken action, they probably represent a significant proxy of the problems that are occurring. Certainly the repeating nature of the complaints and the effort that these folks have put into tracking down a solution should give Google pause for thought and hopefully action.

I find the one of the most interesting aspects of these Google Groups posts is there is primarily only 1 viewing for each post. In other words, nobody from Google responds in any way. I don’t care what the answer might be, but at least answer someone. It’s a case study in how not to treat ‘customers’. If Google’s goal is to present relevant information to searchers, you would thing that Google would help people who are only trying to help them accomplish this.

Full Disclosure, I’m the Jim from post #5 on the Google Maps Group. It’s been a week, no response at all, I doubt there will be.

P.S. Yahoo maps was up and running flawlessly for all 27 sites I submitted.

Thanks for stopping by. Google seems to have someone stop into the groups about 1 every two weeks. You will see a burst of responses from Jen or Silene in one fell swoop and then they will go quiet. They never catch up with the backlog nor have they been forthcomng with answers.

I would agree that bad customer services is worse than no customer service.